Discredited Army analyst built his career around crime lab [View All]

[unhappycamper]

Discredited Army analyst built his career around crime lab
Posted on Sunday, March 20, 2011
By Michael Doyle and Marisa Taylor | McClatchy Newspapers

WASHINGTON — The career of military lab analyst Phillip Mills started unraveling the day a colleague made a discovery that would rattle military justice.

On April 28, 2005, Dr. Timothy Kalafut was reviewing Mills' analysis of DNA samples when he noticed something strange. The sample ID numbers looked odd.

~snip~

Mills later admitted falsifying the test run report at the U.S. Army Criminal Investigation Laboratory outside Atlanta, but he defended his overall record. He called the incident a "case of bad judgment," one unique in his three decades of law enforcement forensics work.

The discovery, however, prompted a review of hundreds of his cases and revealed serious problems. It also, slowly, forced lab officials to reconsider Phillip Randolph Mills himself.

"The real Phillip Mills, as we now know, was not as he advertised himself to be," Navy Lt. Michael Torrisi subsequently declared in a June 2010 legal brief written to attack Mills' credibility. "The real Mills displayed incompetence, deceit and sloth."